Spirit of Africa

For every headline-grabbing crisis in Africa, there's a less publicized story: the Africans confronting it, their courage, imagination, brains, and grit. The leaders on these 22 pages—activists, artists, doctors, athletes, entre preneurs, economists, and more—are their continent's hidden wealth.

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The Peace Squad: The Ivory Coast Soccer Team

Back in early October 2005, when the whistle blew on the last game of Ivory Coast's successful qualification run for the 2006 World Cup, a 3-1 win against Sudan, captain Didier Drogba sank to his knees and led his teammates in pleading for peace back home. Ivory Coast, a West African state, has been divided since a civil war started in 2002 between the eventually rebel-held North and the government-controlled South. Every game “les Éléphants” have played since the beginning of the war has been an encounter against both the opposing 11 men on the pitch and the civil war back home, every trip to the dressing room a quick opportunity to call home and find out the latest news.

With World Cup qualification, the team's prayers were answered. North and South danced in the streets for two days. President Laurent Gbagbo, who controls the South, awarded all players, North and South alike, million-dollar villas and honorary knighthoods and called for a truce. For a brief moment the divisive concept of “Ivoirité,” which excludes most northerners, was forgotten. An ABC/ESPN ad starring the members and music of U2 spread the story worldwide, hailing soccer as a universal incentive for peace. With some recent success in these peace initiatives, Ivorians are starting to have hope in more than soccer. Recently, Drogba, also this season's leading scorer in the U.K.'s Premier League, visited the North and dedicated his African Footballer of the Year award to a united Ivory Coast. Currently, even as the Elephants cut an early swath in their qualifying group for the 2008 African Cup of Nations, they continue their peacemaking attempts, trying to still the guns of civil war through today's most Pan-African of movements: soccer.

The Head of State: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

President Of Liberia

The African-American poet Maya Angelou once said, “How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!” Today, across Africa, there is a quiet revolution of hope taking place. “She-roes” are blazing a trail and rising to the challenges of rebuilding and re-invigorating their continent. And voters are, increasingly, putting their faith in these women as capable and upstanding saviors. What do these women have in common? They are women guided by wisdom, blessed with humility, and driven by justice. They are women with a vision for their families, their communities, their nations, and all of humanity. President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is one such woman. Where many might see insurmountable blockades and barriers, President Johnson-Sirleaf sees possibility and promise. Faced with the formidable task of getting Liberia back on its feet after years of civil war, this gritty yet gracious grandmother is courageously tackling corruption, reforming education, restoring health care, encouraging micro-finance, and empowering women. As she does so, she is inspiring the next generation of Africa's leaders. Such women deserve more than our recognition and celebration. They deserve our steady support, as they rebuild and re-invent their societies step by step by step.

The Witness: Ishmael Beah

Writer, Former Child Soldier, Literary Sensation

It started, for a lot of readers, with that picture on the back cover of A Long Way Gone. That smile, good God! Has there ever been a more charming picture of anyone, let alone a young man who has seen the carnage and deprivation that Ishmael Beah has seen? But whatever brought readers to the book—the picture, the reviews, word of mouth, or even Starbucks—he finally brought the experiences of child soldiers to mainstream America. For years the world had known of the existence of child soldiers in Africa—in Uganda, the Congo, Liberia, Sudan—and around the world. But it took Beah's book, written while he was a student at Oberlin, to bring to readers the reality of the civil war in Sierra Leone, the absolutely wretched lives of child soldiers, and, most crucially, their humanity and capacity for recovery. The book is raw, run through with melancholy, but so honest and longing that hundreds of thousands have read it, and it's made Beah, now 26, arguably the most read African writer in contemporary literature. Beah's success, and that of other young and brilliant writers with close African ties—including Uzodinma Iweala, Dinaw Mengestu, Chris Abani, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—means nothing less than a golden age of literature from the continent.

The Level Heads: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala And K. Y. Amoako

Economists

In Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and K. Y. Amoako, Africa has two economists who care not just about the numbers but also about the people who have to live with the impact of policy changes. During her tenure as Nigeria's finance minister, Okonjo-Iweala (currently distinguished visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution) took on corruption—an issue that was foremost in voters' minds after the generals were finally thrown out of power, in the late 1990s—and went where no man (or woman) had gone before. She fired corrupt officials, created an activist anti-corruption commission, and even took on the notorious “419” scammers, who prey on people naïve enough to believe in get-rich-quick schemes. And she undertook tough negotiations at home and abroad that led the world to relieve Nigeria of $18 billion in what's called “odious debt,” accrued throughout 15 years of military rule. During his 10 years as executive secretary of the United Nations' Economic Commission for Africa, Ghanaian economist Amoako put together a crack team of young economists who work with Africa's finance ministers to develop concrete plans for integrating Africa's small economies into larger economic blocs that could compete in the global market, and are tackling the impact of H.I.V./AIDS on governments' capacities and operations, cleaning up corruption, and changing the way Africa's donors do business. Ngozi and K.Y. can debate exchange-rate policies with the best of them, but they've done more to move Africa's economies forward than any number cruncher could ever do.

by Gayle Smith and John Pendergast

Photographed by Jonathan Becker at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

The Visionary: Mo Ibrahim

Trust a man who, even as a poor Sudanese high-school student in Egypt, thought he could be a top international scientist to have grand ideas for changing his continent. Throughout his life Mo Ibrahim has peddled seemingly implausible visions and carried them off. He has built several cell-phone empires and fortunes, the most recent in Africa. Now he is creating an annual Nobel-like prize for Good Governance in sub-Saharan Africa. He has announced he will give a whopping $5 million prize distributed over 10 years to Africa's best head of state, with a smaller retirement stipend after that. The criteria are that the winner has governed democratically and honestly, done a good job for his (or her) people, and retired on time. Just in case anyone does not take his plan seriously, he has recruited Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary-general and one of the continent's most famous sons, to chair the selection panel. As in his business ventures, Ibrahim is impatient with conventional thinking. Aid, he argues, helps, but is a Band-Aid. Africa needs good government so that it can attract private investment. Typically, he is not stopping at the prize, but is also putting his money behind a new private investment fund for Africa.

The Provocateur: Chéri Samba

Artist

I first saw Chéri Samba's work a long time ago in Paris at the Pompidou Center. The show was called “Magiciens de la Terre.” The paintings were “naïve” and complex at the same time and painted with such a vibrant palette of yellows, blues, and greens that I was easily transported to his Africa, an Africa of stereotypes and colonial ignorance as well as pleasures and success. He draws on contemporary imagery such as comic books and advertising posters to paint a tableau of anecdotal scenes depicting power, corruption, fear, mortality, prostitution, and the local marketplace. Along with narrative prose and slogans that cover some of the canvases, his visual imagination is stunning. His work actually reminds me of contemporary retablos paintings of Mexico, and like them voices a profound social and moral discontent. It can appear very literal, but all his paintings are reflexive and narrated from a distinctly African point of view, one that can sometimes be quite arrogant. He is aware of the success of his paintings, recognizing that only a few years ago he was just another one of the many artists selling their work at the local market. Now Western critics and dealers all wish to stake ownership of it. This month seven of Samba's paintings (six from Jean Pigozzi's Contemporary African Art Collection) will be exhibited at the Venice Biennale. His work is a modern metaphor for the Africa of today, and through his art he is trying to reclaim it.

by Damien Hirst

Photographed with his painting And Not War at his studio in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, by Vanessa Vick.

The Siren: Angelique Kidjo

Throughout the course of human history, the global family has been unable to find solutions to the evils that persistently deny the achievement of enduring peace and harmony. But as long as these evils persist, they must be resisted. Popular culture believes that the function of the artist is to entertain. Artists are told that to be political or to challenge authority is an abuse of their gift. How fortunate for our common humanity that so many throughout history have refused to acquiesce! I believe that art is a prime facilitator of truth, and those who have come to embrace this have always enhanced our humanity. Angelique Kidjo is such an artist, using her work and her growing fame to change the way the world views Africa. She helps raise the profile of social causes. Beyond her music, she uses the upheaval of her childhood, in Benin, as the backbone for Batonga, her nonprofit effort to help educate young African women. Most artists talk about doing good; few go out and do it. Angelique Kidjo is one of them.

In 1969, on the edge of the Sahara Desert in Burkina Faso's dusty capital, Ouagadougou, a film festival was born. With outdoor theaters, mo-ped traffic jams, and mango slices in lieu of popcorn, FESPACO today is the Cannes of Africa, the most important cinematic stage on the continent. This year the top prize—the Étalon de Yennenga—was given to Newton Aduaka for Ezra, his chilling story of a child soldier. Other awards went to Cheick Fantamady Camara for Clouds over Conakry, Daniel Taye Workou for Menged, and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun for Darrat. Other FESPACO regulars include directors John Akomfrah, Fanta Regina Nacro, and Moussa Sene Absa, and documentarist Jean-Marie Teno. With any luck, Osvalde Lewat-Hallade's nonfiction depictions of injustice and Isabelle Boni-laverie's highly praised short films will help make them the next Safi Faye, the FESPACO veteran and pioneer of women filmmakers in Africa. Teddy Mattera, who teaches writing and directing in Johannesburg, turned to comedy to help define cinematic language for the new South Africa with Max and Mona. Gaston Kaboré has traded in his award-winning directing talents to focus on training future directors. Helping him open doors for the next generation are Mahen Bonetti, who came to New York in 1970 and has built the African Film Festival into the leading American showcase for African movies, and Danny Glover, whose new production company, Louverture Films, produced the critically acclaimed Bamako, a searing indictment of the World Bank's work in Africa. If Senegal's Ousmane Sembène is the father of African cinema, these are his offspring.

The Believers: Clerics

Archbishop Ndungane, the Reverend Byamugisha, Archbishop Ncube.

Just as Archbishop Tutu was the scourge of South Africa's apartheid leaders, so Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube has become the moral leader against Zimbabwe's increasingly repressive president, Robert Mugabe (himself a Catholic), who at 83 refuses to give up power, even if it means destroying his country. Ncube has quite deliberately stepped into the dictator's crosshairs, calling for a popular uprising and comparing Mugabe to Pol Pot. “The church has a prophetic role to speak the truth when no one else dares to,” he says. His phone is tapped, he's trailed by agents from Mugabe's secret police, and he has received death threats, as has his elderly mother. But he insists that he can no longer sit by while Zimbabwe—once celebrated as Africa's brightest economic star—falls into the vortex of failed statehood, with unemployment at 80 percent, inflation at more than 3,500 percent, and a life expectancy of barely 36, the world's lowest. Anglican Archbishop Ndungane's first name, Njongonkulu, means “big vision,” and it has proved apt. He has headed the Debt, AIDS, Trade caucus for the African Council of Churches; started the African Monitor, to speak out for more effective use of aid; pressured the South African government to do more to combat AIDS; and taken a lead role in trying to heal the emerging schism within the Anglican/Episcopalian church over the acceptance of gay clergy. The Ugandan Anglican cleric, Reverend Canon Gideon Byamugisha, has led by courageous example. Within 20 minutes of hearing he had tested positive for H.I.V., he was at a podium announcing it—this was 1992 and such candor took real guts then; he risked being stoned. He was the very first of Africa's priests to admit to having H.I.V. and, through his African Network of Religious Leaders Living with or Personally Affected by H.I.V./AIDS, has been tilting at taboos ever since.

The Whistle-Blower: John Githongo

Journalist, Anti-Corruption Crusader

Corruption in Africa, says John Githongo—the youngest person ever elected to the board of the influential anti-corruption lobby Transparency International—is “as debilitating as H.I.V./AIDS.” In Kenya in the 1990s, officially sanctioned scams drove the economy back by a decade. Appointed anti-corruption czar in 2003 by popularly elected Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki, Githongo attempted to dismantle the old networks within the bureaucracy. But he found himself in trouble when, a year into his tenure, he began investigating an embarrassing security scam—nicknamed the Anglo-Leasing scandal by the Kenyan media—that implicated members of the president's inner circle. Citing threats to his life, he resigned and went into exile in London. From St. Antony's College, Oxford, Githongo turned whistle-blower. Last year he went on the BBC, claiming that a senior Kenyan Cabinet minister had warned him off the Anglo-Leasing investigation. And things became really interesting when he bolstered his claim by producing a recording of that conversation. It turned out that Githongo had been secretly taping his government colleagues as part of his investigation. As the public applauds, the political elite gnashes its teeth. Undaunted, Githongo continues to release his recordings over the Internet.

by Parselelo Kantai

Photographed by Jonas Karlsson in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.

The Entrepreneurs: The Youth and Women's Foundation

Micro-Finance Collective

Wander through any West African marketplace and what do you see? Women. Women selling everything from spices to souvenir mud cloths. Adolphine Asimah founded the Ghana-based Youth and Women's Foundation in 2001, believing that these women hold the key to transforming lives continent-wide. It's called micro-finance, and it couldn't be simpler. Women traders who otherwise fall beneath the radar of the lending banks club together to borrow, typically around $100. Each uses her share of the capital to develop her trade, be it raising chickens, importing brassieres from Togo, or providing hot meals to office workers. To this savvy, Asimah adds hard business skills with classes in recordkeeping, profit forecasts, and capital growth. A percentage of each woman's weekly profits goes to pay off the loan. Micro-finance works well in Ghana because it builds on an already familiar practice of credit rotation in groups known as osusu: “We are working on something old and improving it,” explains Asimah. “The women know each other, trust each other, and monitor each other. A failed debt becomes the debt of the entire group.” Hence, the global micro-finance repayment rate is more than 95 percent, which would make any bank manager smile. In Africa, where women are often left in charge of households, transforming market women into credit-worthy small-business owners means better education, health care, and nutrition for their kids. “It's sustainable development, not charity,” says Asimah.

The Healers: TASO

On a pale wall in the reception area of an old building within the grounds of Mulago Hospital, in Kampala, Uganda, hangs a portrait of a handsome gentleman—the late Christopher Kaleeba, who died 20 years ago at 36 of H.I.V./AIDS. The building houses the AIDS Support Organisation (TASO), sub-Saharan Africa's biggest care-and-support group for H.I.V./AIDS patients, founded in 1987 by Christopher's beloved wife, Dr. Noerine Kaleeba. The disease has had a devastating impact over the last few years on this East African country. Dr. Kaleeba was determined to banish the stigma that surrounded H.I.V./AIDS—she became the driving force and face of the organization. It was TASO that helped show Ugandan society that H.I.V./AIDS was not an automatic death sentence. People with this condition could go on living and contributing to their families and society as a whole. Since 2001, TASO has been run by chief executive Dr. Alex Coutinho, a Ugandan public-health physician, with a budget that has risen to $22 million. “TASO delivers cutting-edge H.I.V. services like home-based H.I.V. testing through its countrywide service centers,” he says, “while retaining its strong community focus, compassion for the infected and affected, and strong advocacy for the rights of people living with H.I.V./AIDS.” Today TASO cares for more than 60,000 people across Uganda, 20,000 of whom are patients on anti-retroviral therapy.

The (Red) Stakeholder: Lulu Vilapati

Lulu Vilapati works as a translator at the Baylor pediatric-AIDS clinic in Swaziland. In this “whole family” care setting, anti-retroviral medicine purchased in part by (Red) consumer action is dispensed. Vilapati turned 24 the day this photo was taken. She was tested and found to be H.I.V.-positive in 2003, when she was pregnant with her daughter Sinethemba (“We have hope”). Because she was diagnosed early, mother-to-child transmission was prevented and Sinethemba was born H.I.V.-negative. Today (Red) money—which, in effect, makes shareholders of its beneficiaries—is flowing through the Global Fund (a partnership of governments, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector working together to rid the world of AIDS, TB, and malaria) into Swaziland and Rwanda to get the medicine needed to ensure that more babies are born healthy and that more mothers stay alive to take care of their children. This beautiful and energetic mother-and-child team and the other women and children here are shining examples of the multitude who pass through the clinic each day. In Swaziland, the country with the world's highest H.I.V. infection rate, the Global Fund works to keep people like Lulu Vilapati alive and healthy.

by Christy Turlington

Photographed (standing at right, with her daughter Sinethemba and patients) by Mark Seliger at the Baylor-Bristol-Myers Squibb Children's Clinical Center of Excellence in Swaziland.

The Literary Lion: Wole Soyinka

Playwright, Poet, Critic, Nobel Laureate

Albert Camus wrote, “One either serves the whole of man or one does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart,” and so Camus called for “courage in one's life and talent in one's work.” Wole Soyinka. This great Nigerian writer has in his writings and in the conduct of his life served the whole of humankind. He endured imprisonment in his dedication to the fight for bread and justice, and his works attain the pure beauty of imaginative power that fulfills that other hungry need, of the spirit. He has “courage in his life and talent in his work.” In Soyinka's fearless searching of human values, which are the deep integument of even our most lyrical poetry, prose, and whatever modes of written-word-created expression we devise, he never takes the easy way, never shirks the lifetime commitment to write as well as he can. In every new work he zestfully masters the challenge that without writing as well as we can, without using the infinite and unique possibilities of the written word, we shall not deserve the great responsibility of our talent, the manifold sensibilities of the lives of our people which cannot be captured in flipped images and can't be heard in the hullabaloo of mobile-phone chatter. Bread, justice, and the bread of the heart—which is the beauty of literature, the written word—Wole Soyinka fulfills all these.

The Agitator: Zackie Achmat

Co-Founder, Treatment Action Campaign of South Africa

In the fiery 1970s, Zackie Achmat was an anti-apartheid activist, jailed five times without trial. With a new society in 1994 came a new foe: AIDS. H.I.V.-positive himself, Achmat co-founded the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in 1998, committing his life to patient rights at a time when H.I.V. was a death sentence for the poor. He flew lifesaving generic drugs into the country in defiance of major pharmaceutical companies. He battled the corporations—and won, allowing the import of cheaper generics. The campaign pushed the “denialist” South African government kicking and screaming to provide drugs to all. The government still struggles to meet its deadlines, but hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved. These battles have cost him. He refused anti-retrovirals—coming close to death—because they weren't generally available. He's never courted respectability. His personal life has been political—he's gay, and was once a “rent boy”—and very public. He's a man of contrasts, the educated man with working-class roots, dangerous to some, romantic hero to others. “Positive” in more ways than one, he radiates charm and vigor. Now in his 40s, Achmat is stepping down as TAC chair to concentrate on his Ph.D.—focusing on social change. “The TAC shows,” he explains, “that active citizenship through participatory democracy restores dignity and equality in the face of stigma and discrimination.”

by Jo-Anne Richards

Photographed with his dog Socrates by Jonas Karlsson at Muizenberg Beach in Cape Town, South Africa.

As far as the American media are concerned, Africa is the bad-news continent, a real depresso. In news reports, documentaries, and action dramas, the cradle of mankind is depicted almost exclusively as a hopeless case and an open crypt: a festering backdrop of drought, famine, disease, poverty, civil war, refugees with painfully exposed rib cages, and military dictators in sunglasses (whose lenses mirror the billowy fire of exploding pipelines). It's long overdue for someone to change the carousel in the slide projector, get beyond the old Hemingway and Hollywood hand-me-downs, and present a fresh, kaleidoscopic view. Launched in 2005, the all-English-language Africa Channel proposes to do just that, offering American viewers a brocade of music specials, soap operas, travel programs, investigative journalism, and reality shows (such as Big Brother Africa) that convey the hidden health and wealth of African life and culture. Zimbabwean James Makawa, C.E.O. and co-founder of the network, recognizes that cracking the domestic cable market and the already crowded programming grid is a toughie. “We're not naïve thinking this is going to be easy,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March 2006. Nothing worthwhile ever is.

by James Wolcott

Photographed by Guillaume Bonn at the home of artist Beezy Bailey in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Uplifter: Dikembe Mutombo

Center, Shot-Blocking Specialist, Chairman and President of the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation

He'll always be grouped with Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning in the pantheon of terrific big men who played for Georgetown University's Hoyas in the 1980s, but Dikembe Mutombo has been, in every way, the biggest. The seven-foot-two-inch four-time N.B.A. Defensive Player of the Year, currently with the Houston Rockets in the twilight of his pro career, was born and raised in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This month in Kinshasa, the country's capital, he'll preside over the dedication of the $29 million, state-of-the-art Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital (named for his late mother) and the realization, at last, of a decade-long push by his foundation to improve the poor state of health care in his homeland. A Pan-African altruist, Mutombo has also devoted much of his attention and wealth to South Africa, enlisting fellow N.B.A. veterans (including Ewing and Mourning) to provide material relief and hold basketball clinics for underprivileged children there. Nearly everyone who has played in the N.B.A. in the last 15 years knows what it's like to get “rejected” by the ball-swatting, finger-wagging iconoclast known as Deke, but thousands more people, from Kinshasa to Soweto, have felt his embrace.

by David Kamp

Photographed by Mark Seliger at St. Philip Missionary Baptist Church in Houston.